Man-Size Jellyfish Robot Could Ply the Seas

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A giant, slimy, tentacled robot modeled after one of the world's
largest jellyfish could be a precursor to self-powered,
autonomous robots that monitor the seas, map the seafloor and
even reveal secrets of marine life, engineers say.

Dubbed Cyro, the newly unveiled
robotic jellyfish is a scaled-up version of another
mechanical swimmer, this one the size of a human hand, called
RoboJelly that was developed by the same team of researchers
at Virginia Tech College of Engineering.

At 5-foot-7 (1.7 meters) and weighing 170 pounds (77 kilograms),
Cyro is the jelly equivalent of an average human guy.

Jellyfish make great models for self-powered and autonomous bots
partly because of their relatively low metabolic rate, meaning
they can move through the sea on little energy. They also come in
various sizes and inhabit a range of aquatic habitats from
shallow coastal areas to the deep-sea, meaning engineers have
plenty to work with when looking for a mimic for particular uses.

Cyro is modeled after Cyanea capillata, or
the lion's mane jellyfish, whose bell stretches about 5 to 6
feet (1.5 to 1.8 m) across, with some observations suggesting the
bell can reach 9 feet (2.7 m) across. The robot mimic also has a
central "bell," this one holding the creature's electronic guts,
with a thick layer of squishy silicone meant to mimic jellyfish
skin covering the entire creature, Alex Villanueva, a mechanical
engineering graduate student at Virginia Tech, told LiveScience.
[ Video
– See Cyro the Robotic Jellyfish in Action ]

The robot's arms, which are powered and controlled by the central
electronics, move radially from an outward position in toward the
center. That radial "musculature" triggers the pulsing motions of
the artificial mesoglea, or the gelatinous substance that makes
up the jellyfish's skin.

The research team tested the jellybot in Virginia Tech's diving
well, a 14-feet-deep (4.3 meters) swimming pool, where Cyro
showed off its vertical know-how, moving from 8-feet-deep (2.4 m)
to the surface with just five complete pulsing motions, said
researcher Kenneth Marut, a graduate student in mechanical
engineering at Virginia Tech, during an interview.

Cyro is still in the prototype stages, and so years away from
real deployment in the seas, the researchers said. The team,
which also includes graduate student Tyler Michael, is working on
horizontal movements, as Cyro currently can move only in the
up-down direction.

"We hope to improve on this robot and reduce power consumption
and improve swimming performance as well as better mimic the
morphology of the natural jellyfish," Villanueva said. The
team also hopes to learn about the real McCoy.

"Our hopes for Cyro's future is that it will help understand how
the propulsion mechanism of such animal scales with size,"
Villanueva said.

Both Cyro and its smaller cousin RoboJelly came out of a $5
million, multi-university project funded by the U.S. Naval
Undersea Warfare Center and the Office of Naval Research. The
engineering team is led by Virginia Tech mechanical engineering
professor Shashank Priya.